In ‘Correspondents’, Hugh Cobbe reflects on the benefits for the study of composers that arise from the corpus of their letters. He describes the collection of the letters of Vaughan Williams, which he and his successor editors have built up to form a database of over 5,000 items that are publicly available online. Describing Vaughan Williams’s connections in terms of concentric circles of decreasing intimacy, he demonstrates what the correspondence reveals about the composer and his world. Relations with his two wives, Adeline and Ursula, are discussed and then relations with his close friends Ralph Wedgwood, Gustav Holst, Martin Shaw, Gerald Finzi, and Michael Kennedy. Thereafter the circles widen to include Adeline Fisher’s relations, his fellow composers, his Royal College of Music pupils, those conductors and soloists who regularly performed his works, his collaborators, and the critics who wrote about him. Cobbe also describes his concerns with non-musical issues, such as the release of interned German refugee musicians, and his enthusiasm for Federal Union as a movement for future peace. Overall, the letters provide a clear picture of Vaughan Williams’s breadth of vision and largeness of mind.

Britten’s relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was complicated. He found the Royal College of Music parochial and amateurish, and was frustrated by composition lessons there with John Ireland, not least in comparison to his private study with Frank Bridge. He largely rejected the influence of English folk traditions and Tudor music important to the ‘pastoral school’, favoring the more cosmopolitan example of Bridge, and his own exploration of continental European modernism. Britten’s view of composers such as Vaughan Williams as insular and regressive has shaped the historiography of British music in ways that still reverberate today. Scholars have typically taken such attitudes at face value; but this obscures a more complex reality, in which the composer attempted to annex and reimagine, rather than simply reject, core achievements of his predecessors, incurring conceptual if not direct stylistic debts to them. In the case of Holst in particular, whom Britten came to embrace in later life, insufficient attention has been paid to this legacy.